stop ta-ta-talkin that blah blah blah

When Sonic Team director Takashi Iizuka speaks, it’s usually confounding. Most people chalk his facepalm-worthy quotes up to a mistranslation. That excuse has always been weak. I don’t care if you’ve had a one-on-one interview with him in the past, making excuses for his excuses is weak Scarred Sun has called-out Iizuka before for his consistently lame justifications for genuinely poor efforts. If there’s any proof that Iizuka is a lazy, clueless director of this franchise, this quote is undeniable proof.

Nintendo Power finally nutted up and asked a question that was worth asking: “We enjoyed [Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1], but the physics felt a bit off compared to the Genesis games. Is that something you’ll look to tweak in future episodes?” Iizuka’s answer:

In this title, we have not done a straight port of the gameplay [from the Genesis games], but rather updated it with actions which could not be done in the previous titles, like ceiling-running. These changes probably made for a different feel to the longtime Sonic fans. We’re happy for feedback like this, and we’ll make sure we can improve the quality even further in upcoming titles.

Yes. The engine of Sonic 4: Episode 1, with all its negatives, has a positive and it’s something that you apparently couldn’t do in the previous games: ceiling-running. Oh wait, you can do that in the 16-bit games. What a great trade-off. The game is constructed poorly to better suit a feature that was already in the game. Iizuka was a level designer on Sonic 3 & Knuckles. He didn’t know about the ceilings in that game? I think I’m out of chain to yank.